The Rose Field

without imagination you never see the truth about anything. Without imagination you think you see more truth, but in fact you see less. You know who

That’s it,” said Ethel. “Not just dæmons, either. Other things we used to rely on. You know, like the idea of helping your neighbor. Or having laws that companies have to obey, like about not building on public land. That

In any system, there are things you know are true, but you can’t prove that they are if you only use arguments from inside the system. Something like that.” “Gödel’s theorem. How does that fit in?” “Well, if that’s true, then it means that if you find a system that seems perfect and complete, where you can prove everything—then you’re wrong. You’re not looking properly. Because we need the gaps, you see? We need the holes where one world opens up to another. A system isn’t complete unless there’s a hole in it. We need the things we can’t explain, things we can’t prove, or else we die of suffocation.

Dreams are soaked with emotion

Every decision we make, anything we do, anything at all, determines what’ll happen after it.

People ought not to do that. To keep children from knowing things, I mean. They should tell the truth.

What we couldn’t understand,” said Henry, “was how people came to forget those old ways, kind of thing. As if everything they used to know had suddenly become just unwanted.” “It was fashionable,” said his wife. “Young people started to pretend they weren’t interested in their dæmons, like it was out of date to take any notice of them. Then they just became a nuisance for some people.” “An embarrassment,” her husband put in.

When I see how much it troubles people—I mean, when they feel that something’s wrong with the world they live in, I feel sorry for them, but I can’t do much to help. I had a friend when I was an undergraduate who worried himself to death, literally; he killed himself. He was tormented by the question of whether he was real, and where his responsibility lay if he was unreal, and why he felt responsible if the world was empty of meaning, and what he could do about it… I felt so sorry for him, but I couldn’t understand anything about it. I was simple, and he was complicated, and I saw that that was a fundamental difference between us. I accepted the world as it was, and he didn’t. He was unhappy, and I was happy.

This is the wrong time of the year for leaves to behave like metaphors.

We need the holes where one world opens up to another. A system isn’t complete unless there’s a hole in it. We need the things we can’t explain, things we can’t prove, or else we die of suffocation.

She felt a wide, still melancholy, not anguish, not misery, but the endless gray light of a day on a motionless sea, as she thought about what she was saying and saw more implications. It was like watching the sand darken slowly as a tide came in, along the whole length of the shore, as far as she could see, the water seeping through, under everything there was, dissolving every bond.

Suppose there was a shadow that wanted to see the sun, and suppose the sun had heard about shadows and wanted to see one of them. They’d never be able to. Either of them.

Well, you see, that’s interesting already. You mean, if it’s imagined, it can’t be real? What about the other way round: If it’s real, it can’t be imagined? They’re complete opposites. Is that what you mean?

What kindness and what good sense for them both to know that they were lovers only for a brief time and to remain friends!

My person, saw like that once. She saw everything and everyone in a light of gold. She saw correspondences and analogies and echoes and resemblances, so that nothing existed without a thousand connections to the world, and I saw them with her. For her the world was rich with meaning and alive with delight. Then little by little this way of seeing left her, so I set off to find it and bring it back.

As she looked up at him, he found he could barely stand for the beating of his heart. He felt that the two of them might have been the only focus of consciousness in the world, so fiercely were they intent on each other.

What kindness, and what good sense for them both to know that they were lovers only for a brief time, and to remain friends.

You think that what matters in a dream is the story, the information, the content, you could say, and that it’s meaningless, because it makes no sense and fades and disappears. Of course it does, because the information is not what’s important. What matters most in a dream is the emotion that comes with it. Dreams are soaked with emotion, with fear, or longing, or love, or excitement, or sadness. They come to give us intense feeling, not information, and it lasts a very long time, long after the information, or the story, is blown away like dry leaves.

They think that things can only be true or not true. But what you learn when you play

Lyra”, she said, "how's Pan going to recognise your imagination, when he finds it?” “I don’t know. It’s a metaphor.” “Well I know that. But it worked, didn't it? I made you think, he was looking for something that had vanished. So you followed him.” “Because I thought he might have been right. Something was missing.” “What did you feel was missing?” “A … certainty about the world. A sort of sense that fundamentally was true and reliable and just there. A sense that we belonged there too. Belonged in the physical world. Whatever that sense was, I’d had it once, and I didn’t have it any more.” “Maybe imagination was the wrong word.” “No, it was exactly the right word. People think imagination is just making things up, they’re just wrong. Even angels are wrong. Imagination is seeing things properly, real things, seeing them fully in all their context with all their connections in place, all the things they mean around them… The secret commonwealth. p. 433

Something real, not imagination?” “Well, you see, that’s interesting already. You mean, if it’s imagined, it can’t be real? What about the other way round: If it’s real, it can’t be imagined? They’re complete opposites. Is that what you mean?

the poem of Jahan and Rukhsana: two lovers hand in hand entering a garden.

This is what I know: without imagination you never see the truth about anything. Without imagination you think you see more truth